Top 10 - 2019

For whatever reason, it was the year of the pas de deux. From duos chummy (DiCaprio/Pitt in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) to psychotic (Pattison/Dafoe in The Lighthouse) to acrimonious and yearning (Driver/Johansson in Marriage Story) to aching from absences of affection (LaBeouf/Jupe in Honey Boy) to galvanized by the possibilities of a gaze fleetingly liberated (Haenel/Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, seen above), to... papal (those Two Popes), cinema in 2019 offered abundant proof that one of the medium's greatest effects is the frisson created by a couple of human beings interacting with each other.

It was also the year of auto-fiction, with a remarkable number of directors using the form to ruminate on their lives and careers, often in ways that seemed confessional and self-exorcising. In addition to Tarantino's grandiose ego trip, a paean to a lost Hollywood that was also, by extension, a fetishistic self-monument, there was Scorsese's autumnal gangster culmination The Irishman, Joanna Hogg's fictionalized origin story The Souvenir, Pedro Almodóvar's warm, wistful retrospective Pain and Glory, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, informed by the experience of his own divorce, and the wrenching Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el and written by Shia LaBeouf as a therapeutic exercise while he was in rehab.

Also, Netflix expanded its influence over the market, and Disney continued to grow its quasi-monopolistic media hegemony. But you've read about this elsewhere (resist!). All said, it was a pretty terrific year for movies.

My Top 10 films of this last year of the decade, to follow...

10. Uncut Gems / Josh and Benny Safdie

With their follow-up to 2017's masterful Good Time, the Safdie brothers further stake their claim as cockeyed heirs to a kind of American cinema that seemed to have disappeared with filmmakers like John Cassavetes and Sidney Lumet: the character-driven, street-level thriller that's as interested in accelerating your pulse as in interrogating the economic and cultural structures that underpin our everyday social interactions. Uncut Gems is a brash and nearly seamless high-wire fusion of gut-level genre thrills and cutting capitalist critique, carried by the raucous, splenetic energy of Adam Sandler's compulsive go-for-broke gambler Howard Ratner. Dexterous architects of sustained, hysterical mayhem, the Safdies craft the film as both a madly entertaining farce of terrible consumer-obsessed decision-making and an almost mythical fable of human folly.

9. Little Women / Greta Gerwig

From contemporary New York City to the suburbs of Sacramento and now to 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts, Gerwig continues, with enviable warmth and fierceness, to chart the ambitions, frustrations, and ambivalences of young women on or just over the cusp of adulthood. In her slyly modernist reimagining of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel, Jo March is a historical forebear and cinematic successor of the indelible Frances "Ha" Halladay and Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson, a spunky lady whose tenacity and headstrong will are able to coexist, undiminished, alongside self-doubt and trepidation. Saoirse Ronan invests her with all the gusto and intelligence the character demands, qualities uniformly distributed to an ensemble cast that fleshes out a fulgent, generous portrait of community. Alcott's explorations of sexist social mores are beautifully rendered here, but Gerwig takes it even further by positioning her commentary, through a clever meta-narrative conceit, to speak as equally to the cultural past as to the present. As such, this Little Women becomes not only an adaptation of the text, but a rousing argument for why and how it's so enduringly resonant.

8. I Lost My Body / Jérémy Clapin

In the animated marvel I Lost My Body, loss is figured in literal terms as a corporeal fragmentation seeking suture. We follow a severed hand as it scampers, clambers, and flings its way across a French city in search of its owner. The encounters it experiences along its perilous odyssey trigger all the sense memories of its formerly unified self, sensations Clapin and the animators recover through strikingly synaesthetic visuals that evoke a collage of haptic as well as emotional touch. What makes the film more than merely a richly metaphorical illustration of somatic trauma is in how it refuses to view its dismembered protagonist, Naoufel, as a lacking body in need of some putative return to wholeness. Instead, Clapin and co-writer Guillaume Laurant understand the body, its postures and desires, as always necessarily incomplete, and convey through a thrilling foregrounding of touch and sound how we use the phenomena of the world, especially in art, to constantly reorient our modes of being.

7. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood / Marielle Heller

There's no way this was necessary, right? In 2018 we were already gifted with Morgan Neville's wondrous documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? (on my list last year), which seemed to encapsulate every conceivable facet of the beloved children's TV icon. Amazingly, it turns out Heller, and screenwriters Micah-Fitzerman Blue and Noah Harpster, found an angle on Fred Rogers that's innovative, unexpected, and reverential without being mawkish or hagiographic. The film partially accomplishes this feat by approaching Rogers through the biographical lens of an acquaintance, journalist Lloyd Vogel (a sensitive Matthew Rhys). But its true masterstroke is in recounting Vogel's story, including his gradual emotional flowering prompted by Rogers, within the studio-constructed simulacrum of an episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Underscoring the artifice of the show yet positing how that artifice served to (literally) model indispensable real-world values - and transform Vogel's worldview - Heller and her screenwriters poignantly dramatize how all social change must begin at vulnerably human scale, as an act of sometimes arduous affective labor. Oh, and Tom Hanks is exquisite.

6. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open / Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn

A thirty-something First Nations woman in Vancouver finds a teenaged First Nations woman barefoot and battered at a bus stop on a rainy day, and spends the afternoon trying to help her escape the domestic abuse to which she's become inured. That's the bare-bones synopsis, but with its modestly astonishing formal design - the film is shot in real time in an illusion of a nearly uninterrupted long take - The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is a testament to the simple, radical potential of aesthetic attention to confer value and meaning. Here, that attention is unfailingly centered on these two women, Áila (Tailfeathers) and Rosie (Violet Nelson). Through the intimate co-presence fostered by their use of extended duration and contiguous movement, the directors counteract the fragmentation and erasure of indigenous lives by dominant media cultures, facilitating the women's re-inhabitation of spatial and temporal regimes from which First Nations people continue to be expunged. Their unbroken aesthetic also allows the relationship to play out with a disarming, shape-shifting naturalism, surfacing realities of gender, race, class, and bodily autonomy that the women must negotiate, separately and together. Sam Mendes' long-take achievement in 1917 may have hogged all the attention last year, but Tailfeathers' and Hepburn's is both less flashy and considerably more rewarding.

(You don't have to go far to see this excellent film - it's on Netflix!)

5. Marriage Story / Noah Baumbach

Not to downplay its anguish, but Marriage Story might just be the funniest film ever made about marital expiration (sorry, the uproarious Scenes from a Marriage). Whether he's depicting the flustered hand-off of divorce papers, the ruthless mendacity of divorce lawyers, the logistics of bicoastal residence, or the overwrought bureaucracy around which this all orbits, Baumbach injects the preponderance of his scenes with his signature badinage and droll observations. The humor acts as a leavening agent to the distressing circumstances, a kind of tonic to take the edge off, but it also reveals a certain generosity and clarity derived from hindsight, an ability to find in even the most painful events sources of levity, understanding, and inspiration to be used toward creative expression. Baumbach has mostly received acclaim for his screenplay, but his direction is just as shrewd in the ways it carefully reveals his particular mode of expression, with theatrical staging and blocking giving everything a pointedly performative flair, as if we were seeing these events experienced and interpreted by creative professionals (we are!). This explains the impromptu "Being Alive," as well as the incredible, practically seismic emotional impressions of Driver and Johansson, who articulate all the feelings that persist in the face of systems that depend on disavowing them.

4. Waves / Trey Edward Shults

Melodrama is not "cool." It appeals too brazenly to our basest emotions, requires little subtlety or nuance, asks from the spectator to surrender her critical distance in favor of unfettered, unthinking narrative absorption and manipulation (none of these things are accurate descriptions, for the record). Does the unfashionable, sometimes unwieldy, capital-M Melodrama of Waves help explain its underperformance with audiences and critics? Who knows for sure. For me, Shults' operatic, bifurcated drama of domestic rift and slow-rising salvation is a total powerhouse of form and feeling. It mobilizes camerawork, editing, and sound in ways more purely exhilarating than just about any film in 2019, creating a pulsating sensorial world completely in sync with the intense ebbs and flows of its characters' moods. What Shults is able to viscerally communicate in this expressionistic register is the often precarious ecology of our relationships, especially in uneven familial units, and how we consciously or unconsciously transfer our capacities for pain and compassion to those in our circles. Like the best melodramas, Waves sends wallops upon its audience, not to drown but to cleanse.

3. The Irishman / Martin Scorsese

A haunted memory piece, The Irishman uses its three hour-plus running time less, as is its director's frequent predilection, to stir up sweeping overtures of destructive machismo, than to illuminate the cracks of disillusionment and existential emptiness that creep up on a man's over-storied but undernourished life. Narrated as a chronicle of semi-mythologized memories by De Niro's Frank Sheeran, the film transpires, around its peaks of excitement, as an elegy to lost time, misplaced purpose, and abnegated humanity, its characters and the political history they're helping to write culled into a scrapbook of postwar American moral dereliction. Still, what a ride! For all the heaviness at play, Scorsese, screenwriter Steven Zaillian, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and a cast on its absolute A-game make The Irishman into something savory, spiky, and surprisingly fleet. It's not just the pleasure of delectable acting by screen legends (Pacino my MVP), but the buzz of the script's unexpectedly absurdist humor and acerbic conversations, which tickle even as they wryly, then gravely, point up the ritual craziness and impotent reality of this whole universe of constipated male psyches. Whether it's actually Scorsese's valediction to the gangster film or not, The Irishman feels like a mighty genre capstone.

2. Ad Astra / James Gray

Plenty of films, especially interstellar-oriented ones, have contemplated human existence by juxtaposing our fragile finitude against the unaccountable vastness of the cosmos, but few have done it from a vantage of such pensive, first-person introspection as Ad Astra. Nor have many films I can think of quite figured outer-space in this way, with such anti-celestial metaphorical dimensions: as a horizon of industrial possibility, certainly, but also as a psychical, specifically generational interval, an anthropomorphic extension of private and socio-cultural experience, an inversion of the soul. It's outer-space as both inner-space and a dilated canvas of civilization's aspirations and foibles, imagined with such audiovisual eloquence and topographical tangibility by Gray, DP Hoytema, production designer Kevin Thompson, and an amazing crafts team, that watching the film feels like actually traversing expansive physical and mental distances. Of course, Ad Astra is as soulful and sonorous as it is because of the figure at its center, Brad Pitt, giving his actual best performance of 2019. Even sans the voice-over cogitation, the actor conveys a profound internal odyssey just through the slightest quiver of his eyelid or the tensing of his comportment. He embodies Roy McBride's journey as a quietly revolutionary evolution of attitude, transcendent not because of metaphysical intervention, but because of the ordinary, transformative human faculties that were always there, waiting to be rediscovered.

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire / Céline Sciamma

Like the film in my #6 slot, the sublime Portrait of a Lady on Fire carves out a luxuriant aesthetic space for women to be corporeally present, visible, and agential, reinscribing female subjectivities into systems of representation that have historically occluded them. Sciamma's film duplicates the meaning of this task, concerned as it is with the material labor and contexts of art. Therefore, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is both a narrative exploration of women artists (and muses) negotiating centuries worth of patriarchal visual culture, and a course-correcting rejoinder to cinema's male-authored scopic regimes, plus a queered treatise on the politics and erotics of looking. All of this without hardly ever leaving the house! It's also an uncommonly passionate love story, with a romance that literally generates flames courtesy of Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, whose perfect symbiosis constantly reinforces Sciamma's egalitarian perspective. Whether using her camera to capture craggy rocks and azure shores or golden-hued kitchens and taupe bedrooms, cinematographer Claire Mathon creates ravishing, painterly spaces for the reciprocal interchange of the women's gazes and bodies. And while their stifling culture might dictate the transience of their relationship - and its concealment under the sign of commodity - Sciamma defiantly shows us how it can never foreclose the meanings, feelings, and desires always pulsing just around an image's borders.


And the closest runners-up...


A HIDDEN LIFE, by Terrence Malick. The director's best film since 2011's The Tree of Life is an aching portrait of principled faith and worldly splendor under assault by a society falling into moral debasement. How can one condone evil when surrounded by these Alpine vistas?

THE LIGHTHOUSE, by Robert Eggers. A claustrophobic, diluvian echo-chamber play of seething masculine aggression and delusion, choked with fog, booze, and mania deprived of outlet. The most strikingly lensed film of the year.

ROCKETMAN, by Dexter Fletcher, an appropriately flamboyant homage to one of the 20th century's most prolific purveyors of pop spectacle. Its energy and panache, especially in its infectious musical sequences, scintillate.

PAIN AND GLORY, by Pedro Almodóvar, with its gently radiating currents of rue and appreciation for all the things in life that contribute to an identity - creative, carnal, and otherwise.

HONEY BOY, by Alma Har'el, which uses its potentially navel-gazing conceit as a powerful meta-demonstration of cyclical, generational trauma and abuse, and as an example of the ability of performance to access buried truths.